The Whitehall mandarin knighted for handing out billions in overseas aid faced fresh embarrassment last night after it emerged that his Cabinet Minister boss has branded such awards ‘an Establishment stitch-up’.

International Development Secretary Priti Patel has called for a ban on top civil servants receiving honours just for ‘doing the day job’.

She accused mandarins of ‘crowding out’ the honours system and ‘preventing other members of the community from getting awards’.

Permanent Secretary for International Development Mark Lowcock with International Development Secretary Priti Patel

Her provocative views surfaced after a furore over a knighthood in the New Year’s honours for Permanent Secretary for International Development Mark Lowcock, the civil servant in charge of Ms Patel’s department.

Tory MPs said it was wrong to honour £165,000-a-year Sir Mark in the face of growing anger over the way the Department for International Development (DFID) spends its £12 billion budget.

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Pressure on Sir Mark, 54, mounted after details of Ms Patel’s outspoken opinions on gongs for mandarins were disclosed. In 2012 she led moves by a powerful group of MPs to stop awards being doled out on a ‘Buggins’ turn’ basis. She told an inquiry into the honours system by the Commons Public Administration Select Committee: ‘Some very senior civil servants have several gongs, crowding out the honours system and preventing other members of the community from getting awards.’

It led to a clash between Right-winger Ms Patel and Sir Bob Kerslake, the then head of the Civil Service and chairman of the Honours Committee – and a former colleague of Sir Mark.

Ms Patel's views caused a clash with Sir Bob Kerslake, the then head of the Civil Service

She told Sir Bob that voters believed knighthoods and other awards for top civil servants and politicians were a ‘stitch-up’ and ‘could be bought’.

They saw it as ‘the British Establishment handing out gongs to each other, patting themselves on the back and rewarding each other’.

Asked if Ms Patel supported the knighthood for Sir Mark, a DFID spokesman last night issued a carefully worded statement saying that ‘she supported the honours awarded by Her Majesty and the Prime Minister’.

Asked specifically if she supported the honour for Sir Mark, the spokesman added the words ‘…and that includes Mark’ to the statement.

A Tory politician close to Ms Patel said: ‘Priti does not want to get into a dispute with Lowcock but her views on distributing gongs like confetti to Sir Humphreys are well known and will not have changed. She believes people should be rewarded for outstanding service to the community, not because they are a member of the Whitehall brolly brigade or the right club.’

Sir Mark was educated at private school Culford in Suffolk and Oxford University, and has spent his 30-year Whitehall career at DFID, where he helped to implement the controversial decision for Britain to spend 0.7 per cent of its income on overseas aid.

Last month he was accused by MPs of being ‘evasive’ over who was to blame for building a £285 million airport on the remote island of St Helena, where it is too windy for commercial planes to land.

He received his first honour in 2011 when he was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath. He is a close friend of Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, who reportedly once shared a flat with him.

Ms Patel, 44, the MP for Witham, Essex, is the daughter of Ugandan immigrants who set up a chain of newsagents in the UK. She was educated at Watford Grammar and unfashionable Keele University.

Since entering Parliament in 2010 she has called for new Whitehall rules to make it easier to ‘remove under-performing permanent secretaries’. They should be put on private sector-style four-year fixed term contracts instead of having cushy jobs for life, she said.

Ms Patel, who has praised Margaret Thatcher’s ‘unique ability to make decisions – and not purchase things the country could not afford’, played a leading role in the Brexit campaign.